Throughout the 2025 NFL season, SB Nation’s Doug Farrar will write about the game’s Secret Superstars — those players whose performances might slip under the radar for whatever reasons. In this installment, we turn our attention to a little-known Washington Commanders offensive lineman who has allowed offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury to keep rolling without injured quarterback Jayden Daniels.
Trent Scott, come on down!
As you would expect, Kliff Kingsbury’s Washington Commanders offense has undergone
quite the sea change over the last two weeks, given that quarterback Jayden Daniels has been out with a sprained knee. In Weeks 1-2 with Daniels, the Commanders ran the ball on 39.2% of their offensive snaps; with Marcus Mariota as the man in Weeks 3-4, that run rate skyrocketed to 51.4%.
Daniels is expected back for Washington’s Week 5 game against the Los Angeles Chargers, which is obviously a good thing, but it’s also not terrible that Kingsbury has re-tooled his offense in ways that could make a difference down the road, no matter who the quarterback is. The Commanders’ passing efficiency and productivity has waned without Daniels — again, as one would expect — but the run game has seen several upticks, and that’s about how Kingsbury has adapted his offense to the rigors of necessity.
With Daniels on the field, the Commanders averaged 5.7 rushing yards per attempt; that’s risen to 6.4 over the last two games. Washington’s yards after contact per carry (3.4 to 4.3), broken tackles per 100 attempts (14.6 to 25.9), and rushing touchdown rate (4.2 to 5.6) are all up, as well.
Moreover, the blocking has been an entirely different beast. With Daniels, the Commanders allowed a pressure rate of 44.3%; that’s gone down to 31.4% since, and the blown block rate has dropped from 16.7% to 10.7%.
Given all this, if you’re now of the belief that an offensive lineman has been part of the emergency solution, you are correct. And it’s not one of the five starters. It’s the sixth man in Kingsbury’s offense, something that the coach has never leaned on before.
In 2024, the Commanders under Kingsbury lined up with six offensive linemen 21 times. They did so zero times in Weeks 1-2 with Daniels, but since then, they’ve done so 27 times, by far the highest total in the NFL, and always with veteran Trent Scott as the extra guy.
Before all of this, Scott was most famous for catching Jayden Daniels’ first regular season touchdown pass, a one-yarder in Week 3 of the 2024 season against the Cincinnati Bengals.
Now, Scott’s primary value — and it’s of more import than you may think — is to be that extra man in the blocking schemes. The Commanders have an Offensive EPA of +0.12 with Scott on the field, and +0.01 when he isn’t. Not that Scott, a 2018 undrafted free agent out of Grambling (HBCU alert!) is the second coming of Trent Williams or Tristan Wirfs; this isn’t a case where the NFL’s next great tackle finally gets his shot in a specific concept. But the ways in which Kingsbury is using Scott have allowed Scott to make the most of his attributes, and that’s what good coaching is.
Furthermore, when that rise in EPA happens with your franchise quarterback on the sideline… well, that’s something else altogether.
Like Alec Anderson of the Buffalo Bills, who served in this role over and over last season when the Bills were wrecking opposing defenses with him as the sixth offensive lineman, Scott’s blocking acumen has allowed the Daniels-less Commanders to win in the run game more often than not. When Daniels comes back, it will be fascinating to see if Kingsbury keeps it up, because the 2024 Bills also drew up and executed a lot of shot plays in the passing game with that extra blocker.
Could Jayden Daniels’ injury actually turn out to be a benefit to the Commanders in the long run? You wouldn’t think so of course, but we’ll see how the 6OL thing plays out, and what the offense is able to do with it.
